396
FREDERICK CREWS
had tragic effects on some people, who "became either crushed or ob–
sessively oppositional or projective ... " And Reich himself, in a tem–
porarily recanting mood, confessed to Kurt Eissler in 1952 that the
whole idea of trying to dissolve character
is very dangerous. You see, the armor, thick as il is and as bad as it is, is a
protective device, and it is good for the individual under present social
and psychological circumstances to have it. He couldn't live otherwise.
That is what I try to teach my doctors today. I tell them I am glad they
don't succeed in breaking down that armor because people, who have
grown up with such structures, are used to living with them.
If
you take
that away, they break down. They can't, they just can't live any longer ....
if you would break down all of the armoring in the world today, there
would be chaos. Perfect chaos! Murder everywhere!
(RSF,
p.
110)
Even this negative statement, which has evidently had no deter–
rent effect on Reich 's movement, clearly indicates that the scope of
orgonomic treatment is nothing less than the removal of the individ–
ual 's adaptive apparatus. That apparatus stands under indictment as
the product of unwanted (i.e., societal) influences. Whether or not he
retains his sanity, the patient will at least have been purged of evil.
And what is sanity, after all? As Reich learned more of nature's secrets
he began to value the wisdom of psychotics, whose ideas so amazingly
resembled his own. In a case history, for example, he praised the
lucidity of a schizophrenic patient bedevilled by "forces": "What deep
thought, and how close to the truth! I assure the reader that at that
time she knew nothing of the orgone phenomena and that I had not
told her anything about them." Without denying his original aim of
securing orgastic potency, he came to treasure the emergence of the
buried self in vatic form. Thus, in a halting and inconsistent way,
Reich foreshadowed the fully inverted value-system of his admirer R.
D. Laing, who has decreed
(The Politics of Experience)
that "True
sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego,
that false self competently adjusted
to
our alienated social reality; the
emergence of the 'inner' archetypal mediators of divine power, and
through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a
new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the
divine, no longer its betrayer."
We needn't be surprised, then,
to
learn that Reich's fanatically
materialistic system gradually acquired all the superficial features of a
religion. Orgonomy as finally elaborated possesses a pantheistic deity
